Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

To be honest. I don’t do anything that is useless. At least, not in my own mind. There is simply no room in my schedule to mess around. It’s been like that for a long time. So, whatever I do, I do it to make the most of the little time I have.

What I did come up with to answer this question, was something that I know how to do that is becoming an obsolete skill. I know how to drive manual transmission. Soon, having this skill will date me. Most of the cars being driven on the road today are automatics. Even larger vehicles have become automatic. The engineering has created superior efficiency in these transmissions, so it doesn’t make sense to produce manual any longer. At one time, gas consumption was better on a manual.

I learned to drive manual (called standard in my parents’ household) as a teen. My latest vehicle was special ordered so that I could continue to enjoy driving manual. For some reason, I take pride in this skill, but it really doesn’t serve much of a purpose any longer. I can drive just about anything, because I do know how to drive a manual,

but with the advances in technology, it’s no longer necessary. The likelihood of encountering manual transmissions when renting, or using someone else’s vehicle in an emergency, are next to none.

Still, I’m glad my parents took the time to teach me to drive a car with manual transmission. My current 6-speed makes me very happy. It’s genius in the snow (although, traction control has evolved and the fact that I don’t drive like a maniac is probably of greater worth).

The downside, being stuck in traffic and having to balance the clutch/break/gas scenario for extended periods of time (sometimes an hour).

What is the nicest thing someone has ever done for you or said to you?
Why did this mean so much?

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

Going negative is real easy to do. The brain tends toward it. There have been many studies done to examine memory and the processing of it. Those studies often imply negativity is the strongest emotional link, and it’s due to the archaic mind that once required paying attention to the bad in order to survive. But, humanity and society has evolved, despite what you see expressed online in recent days, to rely on empathy and compassion for survival, because humanity has recognized the greater benefits of cooperation.

Criticism tends to stand out most in my memory. My history is littered with so many critical people. I’m sure you feel the same. There are so many people out there who relate to this, which corroborates the studies I mentioned above. The bullies really want you to believe they’re the majority. It helps them maintain access to continue the abuse. If only the reason why they want to abuse others was more clear than they get their jollies from it.

Seeing question come up on the Hop that focuses attention on the positive is a nice exercise. In order to dismiss the negative from the brain, one has to actively practice positive reinforcement (PR). No. Not that kind of PR. The kind where a negative thought is replaced with a positive one. Once the brain is taught this, and the exercise is followed regularly, the redirect becomes automatic. Psychologists like to use this exercise for depression, because medication isn’t effective alone. Patients need the coping mechanism to rewire the brain. The fantastic part is that anyone can participate, regardless of their personal mental health, and it costs nothing but effort (which can be asking a lot for some, I totally know how hard some days get).

Kindness is another commodity I’ve found sparingly directed toward me. Yet, I follow the guidance that we should put out what we want returned to us in this world, because that is the rule written across my soul. So, when kindness is directed at me, it matters a great deal. I also recognize the difference between kindness out of obligation and kindness from the soul. When it is expressed in an effort to achieve an end, it has an unnatural cast to it. When it is done with no expectation but one’s own responsibility to be kind, it carries an unmistakable warmth.

Back in the later aughts, when I worked for the University at Albany as a Graduate School secretary, a student stopped by my office to make some inquiries. The conversation turned toward writing. She inquired as to why I let the struggle to become published push me so low that I considered giving up. I gave my ready answer, that this wasn’t something I felt that I had control over, because there were no options in my view. She understood me completely, nodding and agreeing with having been there.

Then, and I wish I could recall her name (for some reason I keep thinking Karen), because her words were the springboard to finding my path, she told me about her journey to publication. This undergraduate student who was several years my senior was back to college because publishing her work had given her the courage to continue that dream. It had changed how family, friends, and colleagues viewed her. It had changed her self esteem.

We met a few times after this, but then I changed jobs and never heard from her again. She had come into my life so briefly, a stranger, and pointed out my path clearly. The steps took months as I struggled with how I would manage. The cost of publishing on one’s own is pretty high, despite the automation provided authors, and at the time I was struggling financially. Eventually, I did find my way to a great independent publishing platform that only cost me a few hundred to get started, and everything fell into place, creating a nominal cash flow that I used to produce a subsequent book, and then revisit the first with the help of a wonderful editor.

What this person gave to me was priceless. I’m forever thankful to her. Not only did it restore a great deal of my love of writing, but it returned my book to me as something of which I could be proud once more. More importantly, her non-judgement was a counter to some advice that was eating my insides, so rife with negativity. An artist I knew from my stint on deviantArt just before this had told me I clearly didn’t love writing, and doing it for myself should be enough–this coming from someone who was showing their work in a european gallery by her early 20s due to connections and privilege. She embodied my point that you needed luck and privilege to get there. Knowing her, I also knew that she wasn’t being inadvertently cruel. She meant to be horrid, often bullying others in the chats, and flexing her muscle, while others kissed her ass for a blessing.

You might wonder why I put so much stock in her bull shit then. To answer that, I’ll refer you to the start of this article. And then, I’ll say that this occurred at a time well before I learned the exercise to retrain my brain to focus on the good. If I hadn’t met that student, I would not have published, and I would not have healed enough to empower myself to get beyond the negativity and criticism that was crushing me.

What tools do you use to organize your writing life? Keep track
of deadlines, blog appearances, guests appearing on your blog, etc.?
What have you tried that didn’t work for you but might
work for someone else?

Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

Let me tell you, organization is something that I learned was necessary long ago, and it has thus become second nature to me. I apologize ahead of time if I don’t walk you through all the steps I take verbatim. There simply isn’t going to be a complete list. Hopefully what I do have to share will be of some use to you. Remember, however, that nothing is one size fits all. You’re going to have to make your own list, probably from the bibs-and-bobs of other lists. And, that is fine. That is what you should do. Don’t break yourself trying to reinvent the wheel. (I learned that in a training about training—see how things are intertextual?)

First and foremost, have a plan. You don’t need a complete plan. What you need is where you are and where you plan on ending up. The rest you will fill in, a lot of it on the fly, as you go. Trust me on that. Every great plan, even ones that are completely filled out, requires flexibility. Shift is going to happen. (I also just learned that saying in the same training mentioned above.)

If you’ve been paying attention to you’ve seen a couple tools already: having a plan (even a minimal one) and be flexible. These mindsets are tools, especially in the creative writing world. The next tool: a way to calendar. A lot of us don’t like deadlines, but they are a reality of the business, whether self-imposed or from outside requirements in the work load. On a blog, you need to plan the month, or even just a week, and consistency does matter. It speaks to your professionalism. For instance, this hop happens every week on Monday at noon. There’s a lot of backstage planning going on. I and other writers come up with topics, which we feed to the coordinator (of which I happen to be one, albeit a pretty absent due to the new baby). The topic for the week is usually placed in our Facebook Group midweek, which cues me to tag it as a topic and pin it to the top. Prior to that the other coordinator has formed the post announcing the topic and gotten us the code to use on our blogs that creates the link up. Then, the authors must write their blogs, and time them to release for Monday by noon. We’re not done there, because we have to show up when the link up opens (at noon) and add the link to our contributions. Hopefully there is time to read, comment, and share other author’s posts. I like to come back later in the week and do this, to optimize views for everyone.

That takes planning, right? How do I make sure it gets done?

I use my phone to set reminders, and I use my calendar on my computer in addition. I will write myself notes, and I keep a calendaring journal to outline each month’s posts, as well as make notes about the blog.

You might wonder how I remember to outline. I just do, because it’s the second week of the following month. What does that mean? Don’t forget to schedule rest. A creative mind needs plenty of it. I’m not just talking about the eight hours of night time sleep. I’m talking, also, about taking a break from working on the blog, or anything. I know. I know. So many sites will tell you that you need to write daily, at least so many pages. If you really feel you need to do that, then do so. The real point is that you realize day 8 of the month is time to start writing the blog (if you choose that date—you could choose day 1). I spend the next 7 days at 8:30 pm -10:00 PM writing my blog. Yes, there are some nights I’m too tired. Thus, I plan to work on it for 14 days. In addition, every Sunday night (sometimes I get lucky and am able to get to it between Thursday and Saturday), I work on my post to the blog hop.

The one thing I need to do is schedule more time for proofreading. You’ll see typos and hanging sentences, and I apologize, but it’s really hard to make sure everything is 100% when I’m the only person working on the schedule, topics, writing, editing, proofing, and layout. Intense!

Are there tools to help? Spellcheck and other apps do their thing, but they just simply are not enough. The problem often turns out to be a correctly spelled word, but it’s the wrong tense. I’ll find these after the post has gone out, which is fantastic, as I’m usually out of the writing office, and there’s nothing I can do about it for hours. When you’re a writer, you worry a great deal about these things, because you panic that readers will see it and lose all confidence in you. Don’t. No one is perfect. I had Harvard educated professors telling me all about their typos, as we shared around the table. We all smiled knowingly. You won’t get them all. But, I feel you, like when I read one of my books and see that there’s a typo, and I just paid a proofer a couple hundred…so fired. (Please smile. That was a joke. Proofreaders are just as human as us authors.)

My two favorite tools have to be my phone and my journal. These have worked out well for me. I also use a number of apps to help me create great images, and connect on social media. So what hasn’t worked out? Flying by the seat of my pants all the time and using only post it notes, and manila folders haven’t really helped. I wouldn’t use a folder like that until you’re ready to pack stuff away for posterity. It’s not a great way to organize a book project. If you like the idea of a physical folder, I’d go with notebook with pockets or a multi tab folder. You’ll need the space and separations to effectively organize. If you’re going to use post it notes with abandon, tape them onto a larger sheet of related notes, so you don’t lose them. You will lose them. I recently lost one I had made notes on for a blog post coming up. I had to recreate the information so I could write. To this moment I cannot say that I even got close to the great list I had created on that note. What’s better than post it notes? Try using the notes function on your phone, or write text documents on your computer that you keep in a dedicated project folder.

There are going to be times that you have to be flexible and abandon your planning and even your tools. But this process will become second nature, and you’ll learn to work in it the best way for you. If you’d like to know anything more specific or have a few more details on my process, feel free to comment below with a question.

Now, go on over and see what tools the other authors have on deck. Happy blogging!

Have you ever noticed that your writing alters a bit depending on topic, genre or for other venues? Do you think that your writing is better when you pen a paper for a class or an article for a news outlet, as compared to jotting down a new poem or starting up a new book? What do you think enables or inhibits your writing in these cases?

I noticed that my writing in the case of papers held quite a different tone of authority than the tone underlying my novels back when I was in undergraduate school. This type of writing is something that I often cite as being responsible for honing my craft. In papers and articles, even this blog, the writing must hold more authority. Passive voice has no place here, because it weakens the argument and strength of the point.

The abandonment of passive voice is a skill that is learned early in a writer’s career but haunts them throughout their tenure. Of all the obstacles in writing, this one has stood out as the most discussed by other authors (next to marketing). While writing papers and articles, the voice of the work is in the present—in the moment, if you will. I think this helps to refocus the brain and allows the writer to use confident words and tones.

When writing a historical fiction, my brain is functioning with the idea that this has already happened. the moment is past. Therefore, it laxes into a more passive, past tense and weak tone–as if sighing resignedly about the entire thing. Writing fiction in third person also takes on this temperament and it is difficult to keep reminding oneself that this is in the moment and not the past.

Most writers, I would dare say, connect in these disparate ways to the forms of writing they take on. Perhaps, the help they seek in finding ways to deal with the problems in their writing can be found in connecting these ways of writing more uniformly, as in dropping what is not working and taking up what is working. Indeed, this might be more difficult than just saying to do something one way instead of the other. The brain is a tricky machine, and the desire to do something instead of another is just not that simple.

What if I came to all of my writing with the same sense that is a paper about a relevant and present topic in the moment? That is sort of how I addressed the issue of passive voice creeping up in my work. Of course it still manages to creep up here and there still, but I am aware of it gumming up the narrative and making things weak. My initial writing is more lax, as I am trying to get all my ideas out without loosing them. When I edit, that is when I regard the work as taking place in the moment, instead of the past, though the tone of the story might be that this has already happened, and I’m relating it as it either happened to me, or was related to me in some other fashion. Through this process, the narrative gains strength and authority, molded into the much better writing I exhibit in non-fiction.

Another tool that has helped me realize the different strategies of different kinds of writing is the Script, or screenplay. Given only 120 pages in which to tell your tale, and narrow margins in which your characters will speak, you learn the economy of words. This skill is learned, although some individuals exhibit an economy of words naturally. Some individuals take it too far. (Hemingway, I’m looking at you!)

All of these tools and processes, however, cannot turn uninspired writing into a best seller. I have no answer for writers regarding the ability to pen great stories. That is a question as old as writing, I would guess. To be honest, it’s a subjective assessment. Just like some people have no interest in writing non-fiction, others have no interest in writing romance or mystery or fantasy or even science fiction. Each author has their reasons, based on a subjective assessment of the genre. One should not automatically think their work is uninspired, or insipid, because some of the feedback returned to them suggests the work might be boring. Did you get the right test group?

Let’s have a little fun this time…So you want to learn German…

As I mentioned last month, Duolingo added a whole slew of new vocabulary and lessons back into the stuff that I had already completed. I am not mad. This makes me more proficient. In three days I zipped through the lessons and now I am just on a repeat loop making my brain remember it all. It was a lot! I may have rushed more than necessary and hurt myself in the process. Just because I zipped through doesn’t mean I am retaining the language lessons I completed. A lot of it was simple, stuff I pretty much already knew. Still, it’s a lot! I mean a lot! I am reeling from all of the words added.

A new favorite: Baumwolle. It means cotton. If you pick apart the word it literally means ‘tree’ + ‘wool’. Is that the cutest thing ever? Tree wool! How can you forget that? So in one word, I have just remembered three. Tree, wool and cotton. Bam! Just like that. Pretty much that is how it works. I mean, after all, words are signs. They stand in for the objects of which they’re designated. I guess I am a visual learner, in some ways, yeah?

Try to forget Baumwolle with this in your head…

There have been a couple more words that are tongue twisters. The key is to realize that most big German words are compound words like Baum + Wolle. No sweat. Just say the words sorta mashed up. You don’t even have to mash them, I guess. The list of words strung together in speech will be clear enough. You just have to remember no spaces when writing it.

There have also been some words that sound like something other than what they mean. Wie, for instance, keeps making me think why, instead of how. And then there are those like wind which is wind. Eventually, you just keep them straight thanks to repetition. That’s too much to hope for with the brigade of whiches and whys.

The newest word that puts me into giggles saying it is die Umgebung. It simply means environment. This isn’t the same issue as wrapping my tongue around Vegatarier’s first and last ‘r’ loop. It’s that it sounds like something else entirely, but not in a false friends way (where it sounds or is like the English word for something else). Either way, I won’t be forgetting this one either. Much like der Hase, I keep repeating it in my head or outloud because it’s just a fun word.

I couldn’t help myself. This scenario popped in my head this morning and I had to meme it. This meme pokes fun about both stereotypes of German and American people, language learning and highlighting how it might be humorous to some but not others. I hope you’ll find it amusing, because Brunhilde draws up Bill and Ted quite short on their little joke. Go get em, Brunie!